The Great Game (20 page)

  
"It is nothing," he said dismissively. "A pocket world. A place for…"

  
"Yes?" I said.

  
He was always wrapped in shadows. He hid himself so well… He said nothing for a long moment. Then, "It is a place for the dead."

  
At that my heart began to pound. "Are they dead, then?" I demanded. "All this time, have I waited in vain?"

  
"No," he said. Then, "Perhaps. I do not know."

  
"You keep secrets from me," I said, and he laughed. "Secrets are my business," he said.

  
I continued to serve him. I continued to wait. I travelled periodically back to Roanoke. Back here. "A one-way trip," the Bookman called it. "If such a device does in fact exist, and is present on the island, it would be only half-tuned. There were four modules on board the ship, if I recall correctly, and only one could facilitate a full bi-transference node. And that would require an initiation signal… Be careful. They can be…"

  
"Yes?"

  
"Cranky," he said. "And remember. If you go – you will not come back."

  
"Will you not require me still?" I said, and he laughed, and his words chilled me. "Why, I have another one of you in storage already," he said. "Just in case I need you, and you're not around."

 

  The night was still. In the distance, lightning danced in the sky, too far away yet for thunder to be heard. The night felt charged, electric.

  "I couldn't have that," Carter said, almost apologetically. "I couldn't let him resurrect me, endlessly, his agent, his toy, playing forever the Great Game." There was a hard finality in his voice.

  "Did you ever…?" Harry wasn't sure what to say. All his senses screamed danger, but he felt himself unable to move, to act. "Did you ever find them? Where they went?"

  The look in Carter's eyes was one he remembered later. Pain, and something else, deeper, harsher.

 

  
My last visit to Roanoke… it was a century ago, or so. It gets hard to keep time, after a while.

  
I knew something was different as soon as I set foot on the island.

  
The colour of the sky was different. The brightness of the sun had dimmed, and the world was muted in its colours, a grey and misty vista. There were unfamiliar smells in the air, swampy and damp, and when I stepped on the ground my feet sank easily, leaving behind them lonely markers, the only sign of living in this desolate place.

  
It had changed. Was changing. I could feel it in the wind, and when I came to our old settlement the change had become profound.

  
Transparent they were, the houses. I could see through walls into the living quarters beyond. Out settlement was ebbing in and out of existence – impossibly, majestically. It was then I began to hear a voice.

  
What it said I was never certain, afterwards. It seemed to mutter, directly in my head. A litany of complaints, perhaps. It reminded me, strangely, of the Bookman. There was a loneliness in the voice, an anger born of being abandoned. Something deep underground, per
haps. A semi-sentient quantum scanner, whatever that is.

  
I knew, then, as I stood amidst the ruined houses flickering in and out of existence, that I had to choose.

  
Go back. Leave the island.

  
Or go in. Follow them, into the unknown.

  
Into Croatoan.

 

  "What did you do?" Harry whispered. But he realised he already knew the answer. For Carter was sitting there, talking to him. Which meant he couldn't have–

  "I followed them," Carter said. "I had to. My sister, my family… I could not turn back from the unknown."

  "But you're–"

  "Here? Yes."

  And Harry realised, and a shudder passed through him, and in the distance he could hear thunder, now: the storm was getting closer.

  "So you're…"

  "The copy." Was that amusement in Carter's eyes? Or anguish? "The other me went into Croatoan, to that shadow world, and the Bookman remade me, and this is where my memory ends. For another century I had served him as his agent. I am tired, now, Harry Houdini. I am very tired."

  "It hadn't been a dream," Harry said.

  "No."

  "I really died, in Shikaakwa? In the White City?"

  "The Bookman had been interested in you for a long time, Harry Houdini. And when that man cut your throat in the dark, the Bookman saved you."

  "I died?"

  Carter smiled, and his teeth were white, and rain began to fall, big fat drops of warm rain, and thunder sounded, close by now. "I am tired now, Harry Houdini," he said. "And you are young enough to die."

  "Wait," Harry said, "don't–"

  The gun in Carter's hand exploded with sound. Pain erupted in Harry's chest. He heard three shots, and then he heard nothing.

 

He came to on the ground. In the ring of stones the fire had died and the partially burned wood was damp. The rain had stopped, the storm had passed the island. It was morning. There was no sign of the man who called himself Carter.

  Harry felt himself.

  No injuries, no pain…

  Suddenly he had to get off the island. He was trapped in a nightmare and he couldn't get away. This was madness. He was hallucinating, he was–

  "Mr Weiss," a voice said.

  And something came crawling out of the vegetation, a nightmare figure, like a giant invertebrate, and Harry suddenly knew, with an aching clarity, that none of it had been a dream, and that, twice now, he had died.

 
 

 
 
 

The journey out of Vespuccia was uneventful. London and his team piloted the
Snark
ably through the Atlantic waters, and Harry found himself with little to do. He practised coin manipulation and cards and lock-picking, and did his regular exercises with a strait-jacket he had brought with him, with the crew aiding in ever more elaborate incarcerations and watching, half in amusement and half in awe, as he escaped from each one.

  His latest had been an underwater attempt. The crew tied him into the strait-jacket, manacled his feet, put him in a canvas bag and dumped him overboard.

  When he had surfaced, minus the chains, he figured he could use it in his next act.

  But mostly, Harry waited. There was that feeling of anticipation, a calm before activity, the way he felt just before going on stage. Soon he would have to perform. For now, he could rest, wait, prepare himself. The way Winnetou had taught him.

  He often thought of the past. If Winnetou had been his first recruiter, Harry had come to realise that the strange man who had called himself Carter was his second. Without willing it or wanting it he had, in the professional term, been
turned
. A spy, he didn't know where his loyalties lay. With the Cabinet Noir – or with the Bookman.

  Perhaps with neither. He had begun to understand what Winnetou had told him. "All of us, who work in the world of shadows, are but shadows ourselves," the man had told him. "We cast no shadow of our own."

  It was his way, Harry thought, of telling him a fundamental truth. That shadow operatives were to be used, as pieces on the board of a great game, but that, just like chess pieces, they had no inherent loyalty to one side or the other. It merely depended on who played you first.

  He was a magician, at home with illusions and secrets. And yet…

  Perhaps what it came down to, in the end, was simple: he didn't like to be played.

  He had never seen Carter again. And his new master – his new
controller,
in the parlance of the trade – was a strange being, a thing out of nightmare, and his desires were hard to decode. Harry never saw him again, either. From time to time, using established protocols for contact, he met with, or received messages from, other human agents of the Bookman. There was little to compromise his position with the Cabinet Noir. The Bookman showed little interest in intelligence coming from there. Harry suspected, in particularly uneasy moments, late at night, that the Cabinet Noir was not unaware of their new agent's subversion. That, just possibly, the Council of Chiefs and the Bookman had… an understanding.

  Both, after all, were opposed to Les Lézards. And, if that was the case, he was not a double agent at all, but serving a common purpose.

  He preferred to think that, at any rate.

 

When the island of Great Britain came at last into view it seemed enormous, a grey fungal shape rising out of the harsh ocean, and Harry felt his excitement building. He did not like the wait, the anticipation. He was glad it would soon be over. There were great events unfolding around the world, and he would be a part of them.

  It seemed so odd, that a relatively small, insignificant landmass, off the European mainland, a place of foul weather and little, by all accounts, going for it, would become such a powerful player on the world stage. What was it that drove these people to spread out across the world the way they had? Was it, simply, a dogged determination to avoid the British weather? Or was it something else, some colonial imperative taking hard, tempered shape, until like an iron noose it had slowly but surely tightened over the world?

  He didn't know. Something in that need to control, to conquer, frightened Harry. And yet, as strange as it seemed, there was something exciting about it, too.

  The
Snark
sailed through the mouth of the Thames and English towns came into view gradually, a great human sprawl, with factories belching steam along the river and many boats, and Harry saw mechanicals in one, automata they were called, as real as if they were human, and the sailors waved at them. The air was cold and the taste of salt and tar was gradually replaced by the smells of humanity, of vegetation and refuse, and they came, gradually, into the city.

 

It was growing dark when the
Snark
came into the docks. Harry stood on the deck, watching the city. It was a symphony of light, the red sky lit with an unearthly glow as the dying sun gave way to gaslight. Majestic airships sailed through the air above the Tower of London and, in the distance, the great pyramid of the Royal Palace shone in that strange, alien green. Upon the water a multiplicity of crafts sailed, longboats and steamers, sailboats and dhows and ferries going back and forth from north to south bank. Over the city's skyline rose the Babbage Tower, like a strange and ancient obelisk pointing at the sky. The bridges of the city arched over the river, London Bridge gilded and shining with the images of giant lizards, and far away the bells of Whitechapel and Shoreditch and Bow and the booming of Big Ben.

  "There she goes," Jack London said, coming to stand beside Houdini. "Gay go up and gay go down," he said, speaking softly, "to ring the bells of London town." He smiled sideways at Harry. "When will you pay me? say the bells of Old Bailey. When I grow rich, say the bells of Shoreditch." The
Snark
was coming in to the docks, but Jack's eyes were looking at the distance, and the setting sun. Harry shivered, and didn't know why. Whatever Jack was reciting seemed harmless, a nursery rhyme of some sort. "Pray when will that be? say the bells of Stepney. I do not know, says the great bell of Bow."

  At last Jack tore himself away from the horizon, and now looked directly at Harry. "Here comes a candle to light you to bed," he said, speaking so softly Harry had to strain to hear him. "Here comes a chopper to chop off your head…"

  The boat, with a gentle lurch, came to a rest. The sailors were throwing ropes down, whooping in anticipation of dry land. But Harry felt cold, and the words of the nursery rhyme gripped him with a sudden fear that he couldn't shake off.

  "Chop chop chop chop, the last man's dead!" Jack London said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
 

Midnight in Paris.

  The moonlight reflected off the green metal that had once made up Notre Dame. The ruined cathedral had been made, long ago, by Les Lézards, and subsequently destroyed in the Quiet Revolution, when automatons and humans took France back for themselves, and made it an independent republic.

  Punks de Lézard hung around the ruined edifice, humans obsessed with the lizardine line, altering their faces and skin to resemble that of lizards: a part of the process involved elongating and then splitting their tongues, so that they hissed when they spoke, and their skins had been tattooed with alternating bands of colour. Smith, watching, felt the fear in the night, and the anticipation. The Punks de Lézard were feral creatures, murderous and territorial.

  Smith was standing motionless in shadow. The left bank of the Seine, in the shadow of a bookshop, watching. The Seine slithered like a snake nearby. Smith waited.

  Presently, he heard the sound of unhurried footsteps, approaching. The sound of a match being struck, the flare of a flame, the glow of a cigarette, the smell of burning tobacco. Then the man resumed his walk, came closer.

  "Smith," he said.

  Smith stepped out of the shadow. Extended his hand. "Van Helsing," Smith said.

 

He had come to France by fishing boat, departing the Limehouse docks on a ship that had halted, mid-channel, to let him out: the fishing boat had been waiting and picked him up and dropped him off on the continent, near Calais. From there he took the train to Paris.